Rome, Aug. 20 (Reuters): An Italian pensioner felt faint and had to be taken to hospital when he realised he had forgotten to hand in a lottery ticket that could have won him a 66-million-euro jackpot of a lifetime.

He was so busy organising his daughter’s wedding that he forgot to take his slip to the lottery office when Europe’s biggest-ever jackpot was up for grabs last week.

he realised he had guessed the correct six-figure number, he felt faint and had to be admitted to a hospital near Rome, Italian news agencies said yesterday. He was discharged two hours later.

The actual winning ticket for Italy’s Super Enalotto, whose jackpot had been rolled over for six months, was bought just outside Milan. The lucky punter remains anonymous.

Magic man

London (Reuters): American magician David Blaine, dubbed “the modern day Houdini,” is to be suspended in a glass box over the Thames river in London for more than six weeks without food. The flamboyant, 30-year-old New Yorker, famed for spectacular stunts atop poles and frozen in ice, is to be hauled into solitary confinement on September 5 in what he called “the most extreme exercise in isolation and physical deprivation ever attempted.” Against the backdrop of London’s Tower Bridge, he will spend 44 days suspended by a crane in his clear plexi-glass box “with no food, no communication and no distractions of any kind.” He will have one tube to give him water and another for urinating. “We are all capable of infinitely more than we believe,” Blaine said as details were released of his endurance test that will be carried live on British television. This is the first time that Blaine, who rose to fame with his “street magic” displays in New York, has ever attempted a major stunt outside the US.

Wife wanted

Rome (Reuters): Active 102-year-old Italian looking for love and marriage. Promises can still deliver the goods. Centenarian Salvatore Bordino, a father of five who is an avid clay-pigeon shooter, can’t understand why he is having trouble finding wife number three. “I have a house, a pension and I can carry out all my manly duties,” Bordino, who lives on his own in the southern Italian region of Calabria, told online newspaper Il Nuovo on Wednesday. “I’m looking for a beautiful woman, who is in the best of health. I still haven’t called it a day on certain activities.”